Rabid (66 page)

“His wife, the Beverly, she is pretty! Prettier than secretary!”

“I don’t get it either.”

“My wife, she is poet, studying in English department. She said all professors have love affairs with students, screwing several students at same time. But secretaries! People would worry, would intervene. Why would Sloan have affair with old, fat secretary when graduate students are available, and undergraduate? Not natural.”

Leila hated that they were passing judgment on Conroy’s women, as if physical attributes were all that mattered. Conroy was so needy, and Peggy fulfilled something that he needed. Maybe if Leila had babied him more, he wouldn’t have left his wife and ended up dead.

Everything was so ruined. She felt so bad for Beverly and Conroy’s kids.

“Peggy said that Sloan was going to marry her.”

“Now I know he crazy. Maybe rabies virus make him nuts. Leave the Beverly. Screw secretary slut. Buy new Porsche. Not give old Porsche to loyal postdoc.”

Leila couldn’t do anything to change things. She hated feeling like she had dropped one of her father’s antique vases and smashed it.

~~~~~

Leila didn’t get home until one-thirty in the godforsaken lukewarm July morning after finessing her experiments and cell lines and viruses to last for a while because testifying at Conroy’s trial might take days. Leila tripped on the metal floor trim because the elevator had been too tired to haul itself that last inch to flush with the hallway. She grabbed a wiggly wall sconce to catch herself.

A black-cassocked shamble hunched beside her door.

That goddamned batshit priest was once again,
once again
, leaning on her doorjamb and
stalking
her like a black fluttering poltergeist. “What are you doing here?”

He closed his magazine. “Waiting for you.”

“Witness tampering. Go away.” She jingled her keys.

His head inclined, a resolute, stiff-necked bow, and he studied the hallway’s rough carpeting. “I ask this favor because I helped with Danna’s parents when you called me.”

Bastard, bringing that up.

She swayed sideways from one sore foot to the other. Her exasperated hands were too heavy and smacked her legs. “Damn it. Monsignor, if you threaten me, if you try to change what I’m going to say, I swear I’ll go to the DA.” She was not going to lie to help anyone.

“I have never threatened you. I have only offered to help. I need to ask. Not tell. Not change. Just ask.”

He was probably lying about that, too.

“Fine.” She walked past him and unlocked the door. Two different clicks, one high in pitch and raspy, one lower and sharp, echoed in the deserted hallway.

She thumped her purse on the hallway table and flicked light switches until halogen and incandescent light blazed. If he was going to be in her apartment, it sure as hell wasn’t going to be dark in there.

Owing priests favors was dangerous, but she hadn’t had a choice. Danna’s parents had needed someone there when they heard that news.

Still, she was pissed at herself for trusting another hypocritical priest.

“Fine. You want to ask questions? Fine.” The question wound up and popped out of her. “Are you banging Conroy’s wife?”

Dante’s eyebrow quivered, and his angelic demeanor slipped toward wariness. “Pardon?”

She glared. She knew she was glaring and glared harder. Let the bastard shrink. “Conroy’s wife. Were you screwing her before she killed him?”

The priest’s lips thinned, drawn inside. His graceful brows dropped. “Yes.”

The bastard admitted it. Any less expression and he would have been bragging. She slapped her palm against the wall plaster. “I thought you were different.”

He shoved his hands through the side slits in the cassock into his pants’ pockets.

Meth padded out of the bedroom. Leila patted his heavy, Labrador head, gave him a soft puppy treat from the silver box on the table, and shooed him over to his nest.

She went to the kitchen and brought back a tray with scotch, two glasses, and a bottle of water. Drinking herself to sleep might take a while, so she might as well start. She dripped scotch into one of the glasses and sat in an armchair opposite the couch. “Pour yourself a drink,
Monsignor
.”

He leaned forward to pour his drink, a deep one with little water. “Thank you. It’s been a rough day.
Salute
.”

“Let’s get this over with.”

Dante sat back. “How many women did Conroy Sloan have?”

She held up one finger. “Peggy Dumbass, the one who wanted to marry him and left her knickers in his suitcase after they went away for the weekend together on the university dime. What an idiot. Everyone was talking about it. People from other labs obliquely told me to warn Conroy to stop being so obvious. And he was fined for it under his contract’s morals clause.”

She added another finger. “Valerie Lindh, a professor from Cornell. They’re on the same NIH study section. They’ve been having an affair at conferences forever.”

She lifted a third finger bound with an opal and silver filigree ring. “Another woman, but I didn’t know much about her. Mary something. I got the feeling it was opportunistic, not ongoing.”

“And you,” the priest said.

No reason to equivocate now. She was going to put her hand on a Bible and swear to it in just a few hours. “And me.”

Four fingers.

She said, “At least.”

The priest finished his drink and poured himself another. “What are you going to say about happened?”

He meant about when that priest-screwing slut bitch killed Conroy.

The scotch whisky scorched her raw throat. “Conroy called me and said he had rented an apartment. I called him an idiot but went over there anyway.”

He sipped his scotch and pondered it. “You talked about what?”

She sipped. The scotch tickled her calves. “He had some cockamamie idea, since he’d freed himself of Beverly, that I’d shack up with him, that I’d follow him around like a nitwit toy poodle. I told him to go back to his wife.”

The priest poured himself a third stiff drink in less than fifteen minutes.

She said, “You must have had a rough day.”

He touched his temple and sipped the scotch. “Peggy Strum said the same thing in court today, that he had gotten the apartment so they could be together, that they had set a date to marry.”

Leila laughed one syllable,
Phuh
. “Whatever. He told me he broke it off with her. And I didn’t see Peggy outside the apartment. He called
me
, not her.”

Just Dante nodded and sipped.

The heavy crystal glass in her hand reflected lamplight into the brown scotch like an iridescent rainbow trout flashing in a murky lake. “I wondered what you were doing there. Didn’t even occur to me you were fucking the wife,” she said quietly. “I’m a terrible judge of character. Especially priests.”

“Oh?” He sipped, waiting for her to spill her guts.

“I was completely taken in by your
pity-me
act at the Dublin.” She mocked his sullen, whiney demeanor. “
‘I didn’t know what was missing in my life
.
’
I thought you were different. You were trying to get into my pants. You wanted some ass.”

“No.” He shook his dark head, and his hair swished past his cheekbones. He dragged his hair back with his fingers.

“Motherfucker,” she said, buzzed, bordering on dizzy drunk from sleep deprivation and the smoky scotch. “You thought you were going to get some ass tonight.”

“That’s not it at all.” The harsh lamplight threw shadows down his cheekbone and jaw. He gingerly touched his temple, a gesture toward the nerve that fires into a migraine, the indented collection point for hangover, and the soft skin a Russian roulette gun presses.

God, that was sexy, that pensive, smoldering darkness, the threatened implosion, suggested secrets and arcane knowledge. If he wasn’t a priest, if they had met in a bar, she might have brought him back to her place and explored that darkness.

She drank bitter liquid fire.

“Please don’t get drunk,” he said. “I should leave.”  

“Do what I want.” She sipped again.

He touched his throat. “Should I remove the collar?”

“Leave it. I want to remember what you are.”

He set his empty glass on the tray. “That night, what happened after that?”

“While he was arguing, he grabbed my arm again, and I decked him. I left. Beverly Sloan arrived.” Her hand flipped back and forth in the air, miming entrances and exits. “Her breath reeked of booze. She stormed up the sidewalk and went inside, and you drove up. We stood outside and listened. I couldn’t make out words, just yelling. Could you?”

He shook his head, poured himself another, and slammed the shot.

Leila matched it.

“Then Beverly Sloan called your cell phone and we went inside.” Her constricting throat squeezed her voice louder but she could barely hear herself over her resounding heartbeat. “Conroy wasn’t moving.” His sudden breaths rattled his chest. She woke at night sometimes, convinced she had heard Conroy coughing and gasping, but it was only her geriatric dog hacking. “I should have kept trying CPR. If I had done chest compressions, maybe it would have squashed the blood out of his chest and he wouldn’t have suffocated. If I’d kept doing artificial respiration, maybe he wouldn’t have drowned. It’s ridiculous. There are so many ways you can die, and it was just a little knife, one poke, once. It’s
ridiculous
.”

“It was in his left ventricle.” His voice was quiet. “Anything you might have done would have made it worse.”

“Worse than dead?”

“Dead faster. You did the right thing.”

Blue and amber slivers of light sparkled in her glass as if the scotch flamed. “I should have cracked his chest and sewn up his heart with fishing line.”

“You’re not a surgeon.”

“I’ve taken apart plenty of mice. I know my way around a chest.”

He pressed his palms together and leaned toward her. “Nothing could have saved him.”

Damn priest thought he was counseling her. “The bitch murdered him.”

His mandible muscles under his jaw bunched as if he were accustomed to grinding his teeth. “You didn’t see that,” Dante said softly. “That’s speculation.”

“Don’t tell me what I know. There were two people in that apartment. A knife was in one of their hearts. How do you suppose
that
happened?”

His hands floated apart as if parting the sea and time. “I only know that I did not see.”

The aggression in her spine leaned her toward him, and she said right at him, “Your lover killed her husband for you.”

He shook his head. “I did not mean to have an affair with Bev.”

She scoffed, “Did she tie you up? Threaten you with a gun? Tell you that your bishop wouldn’t believe you anyway and that it was your little secret?”

“Of course not.” Blood vessels in his eyes were beginning to dilate from the scotch. He poured himself another, neat.